The Aura Of the Aura

Published: June 27, 1999

(Page 2 of 5)

Though Democratic bigwigs still aren't taking him too seriously, Bradley has already given Al Gore a bad case of the williwaws -- without saying much more about his own plans than that line about how he'd like his onetime teammate Phil Jackson, the former Chicago Bulls coach, to be his secretary of de-fense. Merely by announcing that his ideas are bigger, he has spooked the Vice President into unveiling all sorts of specific initiatives, to the general amazement of the Bradley camp. (Who knew it would be this easy?)

So he won't be rushed into saying more. ''Policy has to have some roots,'' he explained. ''If it's just policy, then you're back in interest-group land. People think policy means legislation, a bill, but that is not connected to the deeper yearnings. For love. For hope.'' Which, apparently, is where Bill Bradley comes in.

The Iowans who turned out for a political breakfast in Maquoketa on a rainy Saturday last month seemed pretty content, chewing homemade doughnuts and waiting for Bill Bradley.

One man in the crowd got that misty look that comes over so many white guys of a certain age when they mention the Senator's years as a Knick. Eventually, he snapped out of it; he's a Republican. ''I'm not here ready to say, 'Rah, rah, rah,''' he cautioned. ''But I like his family values. A lot of what I've heard are crossover themes,'' with appeal for independents. Across the room, a teacher said she felt good about Bradley for the opposite reason: he seemed to represent a return to traditional Democratic principles. A couple of people even said they sensed that Bradley probably knows more about farm issues than Gore, whose summers hosing out hog parlors down on the family farm seemed to have been wasted on this crowd.

These folks seemed inclined to like Bradley, even after he showed up and told them he wasn't really conversant on farm issues: ''I represented New Jersey for 18 years. I don't pretend to know agriculture.'' (A sore point, I'm sure, for truck farmers in South Jersey.) A man who asked him: ''Are you a person of high moral standards? Are you now and have you always been?'' got this reply: ''I think people have a right to know if I'm a crook. I don't think they have a right to know if you're a sinner. We all are.'' Without so much as a little dollop of sugar-free topping, he told a woman wearing a huge ''Choose Life'' button that they would never agree.

As he speechifies, clearing his throat every few beats, he kicks a chair, absently, or digs the heel of his foot into the floor, hands burrowed deep in his pockets and then set free, all over the place. Sometimes he rubs them together as if to warm them. When audiences run out of questions, he papers over the quiet by asking and answering his own: ''Who was the toughest guy I ever guarded? Without question, John Havlicek.''

Despite persistent reports of dullness, he is in fact highly ironic for someone in his line of work, mocking what he clearly sees as his semiridiculous role in a semiridiculous process. As he turned around and walked back into the building where he'd just spoken in Merrimack, we nearly collided. Forget something? ''No,'' he said, rolling his eyes. ''I'm just being authentic for CBS.'' The cameras ready, he tried his exit again.

Occasionally, this wryness can leave his public squinting in confusion, as when he asked employees at Mount St. Clare College in Clinton, Iowa, about a new building on campus and learned that the donor was big in plastic moldings. ''Ah,'' he said, and then fell silent for a long moment. ''So, thank God for plastic moldings!''

But when he talks about our ''yearning for something beyond the material,'' audiences do respond. ''There is a goodness in most of us,'' he says. ''If we can see that goodness in our neighbor, we'd feel less lonely, less isolated, less fearful, and we'd see our untapped potential.'' Then he invites them to ''feel a part of something you might look back on and say, 'That was a special time and a special journey.'''

As a candidate, Bradley is first a celebrity, a sports legend. In his 18 years in the Senate, he was considered a loner, hard to know and, sometimes, hard to work with. Politically, too, he was hard to pigeonhole, voting against President Clinton's welfare bill but, at one point, in favor of support for the Nicaraguan contras. He was one of only two senators to oppose Alan Greenspan's confirmation as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, questioning his international experience.

As others have pointed out, Bradley and his immediate competition have a certain amount in common, including calm personal lives and only middling oratory skills. Bradley says he barely knows Gore, never having worked with him on anything in the Senate -- where neither won any prizes for collegiality. Both are free-traders who support abortion rights and the death penalty, though in each case Bradley a little more so. They voted alike about 80 percent of the time.

No legislative lightweight, Bradley worked on Latin American debt consolidation and monetary exchange rates and took home his biggest victory in the Tax Reform Act of 1986. But he nearly lost his last race, in 1990, to Christine Todd Whitman over a state tax increase pushed through by Jim Florio when he was the Democratic Governor. When Bradley retired two and a half years ago, he walked away, saying, ''Politics is broken.''